


Dust Bunnies

by Jonaira



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Feels, Fluff, Foreplay, No Sex, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 05:21:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4422953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jonaira/pseuds/Jonaira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m not complaining. I got something way better than a jar ‘o diiirrrt. First time ever you stripped for me. Makes the whole trudge-through-Tartarus almost worth it.” says Percy.</p><p>Or, Annabeth digs up dirt and mature existential emotions happen. Foreplay foreplay foreplay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust Bunnies

**Author's Note:**

> Un-betaed and written at 2 am. All mistakes are my own.  
> First attempt at writing mild foreplay and no action. Be gentle ?

She doesn't know why she does it at the time. By all means it got into a bar-fight with, and then threw logic out the window but she still did it. Ran tripping and stumbling to Percy's cabin on the Argo II as soon as they had boarded fresh out of Tartarus and parted ways to go change out of the tatters of the clothes they'd worn for both no time at all and infinity while in the pit. She'd just about gripped the hem of her shirt, slashed, bloodied and reeking of despair and sweat, about to pull it off and shower, when with no conscious thought but a vague and rapidly mounting sense of anxiety she'd sprinted to Percy's. She had to get to him before he'd disposed of them, what remained of his clothes. She'd been too panicked to knock, all but kicking the door down. He hadn't locked it. She'll wonder what that means much later.

He'd whirled around with a yelp, shirtless with the T-shirt at his feet and the button of his jeans undone. His expression of shock quickly turned into one of fear and concern and he'd lurched across the tiny cabin, hands running down her arms, her face, checking for injuries. At the time neither of them had realized just how far beneath their skin and bones he'd have to look. He must have said something, asked her what’s wrong, but she hasn’t heard and all she can manage is,  
"Take off your pants. Easy does it."

His eyebrows jerk around spastically for a long moment, reminding her of spiders. Arachne seems like it happened a million years ago. She finds her phobia mildly amusing right now.

"Let’s try that again, ok?" He says carefully, once his facial muscles are no longer in spasm.

It’s a little slow to trickle in (her head is still full of blank spaces and parts where it burns when she tries to recall them) but she realizes what this sounds like, she demanding an already half-naked (a part of her that's 'just done, so damn _done_ ' with all the shell-shock sits up, pants and then keels over) Percy to drop his jeans.

She realizes she means it then, that she doesn't care about his state of dress then, just as long as she can get her hands on his clothes, because she hasn't verbalized and rationalized what she wants to herself, she can't explain if he asks her to.  So she shows him instead.

When her hands move to pull down the zip on his jeans Percy freezes, gasps sharp and scared. When she meets his eyes, green drowning in widening pupils, she says to him, "Trust me." The storm building in them quiets a bit and he shuts his mouth with a click and swallows.

She works his denims down, material stiff with sweat, blood and dirt while he holds as still as a doll until they pool at his feet, and kneeling now pushes on his shin gently  for him to step back out of them. Even his boxers are slashed, the elastic cut through and nicked in few places and they hang dangerously low, dark trail of hair doing more than just peeking. When she steps away towards the barely touched desk and pulls out a sheet of chart paper from the rolls of the stuff that Leo had stocked in every cabin for the inhabitants' decoration/planning purposes, she hears the smack of Percy throwing an arm over his eyes and a low choked off " _Shit_." Which is followed by a flat "What." when she straightens it and lays it flat on the wood panelled floor of the cabin.

She takes his hand and leads him to the sheet, about a metre by a metre large, and then pulls until they're standing over it. He never breaks eye contact, baffled but more trusting than a lamb. She lifts an ankle and knocks her shoe against it then, black glossy dust raining onto the surface. Percy looks a bit ridiculous in his tatty underwear and sneakers and socks, but he does the same, and together they knock off all the Tartarus dust and shards of rock like black glass wedged in the treads of their shoes, digging out and cutting their fingers on the fragments lodged more firmly in. They shake out the insides and then carefully step off the chart after placing their shoes away to the side, and she pushes him until they reach the narrow bed, sitting him down. His face looks blank on the surface but is actually too much showing, everything cancelling out together, gaze burning through her. She kneels again, carefully pulling out his socks, adding a tickle to the arch of each foot and is rewarded by the tiniest of smiles.

She dusts his socks off on the chart and then just as carefully pulls off her own and shakes them out, the shimmering pit dust billowing down, darkening the cream surface more and more.

Suddenly, his hands are around her from the back, hot through her T-Shirt. "My turn." he whispers, and she shivers. He turns her around, eyes on the hem of her top, and then gingerly works it upwards; she stretches her arms above her head and helps him get the thing off. He squats and shakes it over the chart, working low to the floor, meticulously turning down and straightening crinkles and folds in the sleeves and hems, and is rewarded by the faint _plink_ s from where the bigger pieces tumble out where they were caught hidden in the upturns of the sleeves. He adds it to the growing pile of their dusted and ripped clothes, and silently stalks back to her barefoot. Percy has lovely toes, Annabeth's ADHD mentions. Like, professional flip-flop model beautiful.

He brushes her hair behind her ears with both hands, trailing lower, skimming over her chest, not lingering over her breasts and instead spreading wide and warm over her sides, where the scabs and cuts are the worst. She feels dizzy and then practices consciously breathing again. He pops the button on her jeans and mirroring her from earlier slowly works them down her legs, chapped lips gently pressing a kiss just above her knee. She feels the goosebumps erupt on her thigh, and the whuff of cool air as he chuckles at her reaction. When she steps out of them, he goes over to the chart, and again keeping close to the ground knocks out all the dust, bigger shards jagged and catching on the fabric thoroughly brushed  off. The upturns at the ankles pour out little streams of the stuff with the bigger pieces pattering down like rain. His own jeans nearby get the same treatment.

Annabeth joins him at the square, now with a coating of darkly glinting Tartarus dirt, and then gets both hands in her tangled hair and finger-combs through it over the pile, shaking out the glinting bits stuck there. She reaches up (was she really taller than him at one time ? It seems like a long forgotten dream-within-a-dream now) and ruffles his shaggy hair to dislodge any bits of the hell they clawed their way out of.

He gives her a gentle noogie. They hold each other for a while, nothing else but sharing warmth after hellfire, not naked and yet more naked than they ever have been and ever will be in in the presence of each other. They pull out some of Percy’s clothes which now hang lose of him, on Annabeth only worse so. Together they draw up the edges and shake the dirt to the center into a tiny hill, bigger gleaming pieces the boulders on the hillside and at the base. Much later that evening they find a little pouch and pour Tartarus into the palms of their hands.

 

Some days when she feels morbidly curious she’ll bring out the pouch. Whenever she dips a finger into the dirt, it always draws back out scratched and cut, even if she'd just brushed the surface. If she’s feeling hot, the dust is searing even though the pouch is no hotter than it should be. When she’s cold, the dust is colder than death and turns her whole arm numb even though it’s only the first joint that’s dipped in.

After Leo comes back with Calypso, one day they divide the pile into exactly half and ask him to encase the dust into two celestial bronze-imperial gold alloy beads. The look in his eyes is unfathomable, but he only tells them a joke about how the casing sounds like-heavy duty tortilla and did they, like, defeat every dust bunny under Percy’s bed and are now commemorating the victory or something. The next day he gives them the polished beads with the dust packed tight within, complete with a lumen through the center for threading and runes for protection etched into the sides. Bless him. They’re the heaviest beads on their necklaces, and they always leave a sore spot or a blister behind if they rest against Percy and Annabeth’s collarbones in one spot for too long. They smirk through their share of hickey jokes, but people catch on soon enough that this isn’t that simple and some of the stories they hear about reasons for their matching bruises there make them wheeze with laughter. They never take the beads off their necklace though and it becomes one of their mutually favourite spots to kiss better on the other’s body.

 

Much later, months and month later, Annabeth finds the words she needed to explain why she nearly showed the rest of the ship what a half-naked Percy Jackson looks like and needed to keep the dirt. “I’m not complaining. I got something waay better than _a jar ‘o diiirrrt_ ” he sing-songs the last part Jack Sparrow style. “First time ever you stripped for me. Makes the whole trudge-through-Tartarus almost worth it.” he tells her, nuzzling her cheek.

She pointedly wiggles her bare behind against him and pokes him when his equally bare chest stiffens against her back.

“It means we won.” She says simply.

“Instead of the Pit always keeping some part of us trapped down there in the dark, its in _our_ power, its _our_ choice to seal it away up here in the light, and steal some part of _it_ to keep as our spoils of war, our triumph over it instead of the other way around.”

He kisses her then and they don’t talk for the rest of the night.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hang out on Tumblr yo :) www.jonairadreaming.tumblr.com


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